Posted
7th July 2001
Tibet Standing
July 7, 2001, is World Tibet Day, created three years ago to
bring attention to the political, economic and cultural struggles
of the Tibetan people. It's a media event designed to help publicize
a very different story than the one told in China's state-controlled
media. When the Chinese People's Liberation Army invaded Tibet
in the winter of 1949-50, only a handful of Tibetans had ever
seen a newspaper, telephone, radio, film, airplane or ship.
According
to Topden Tsering, the first Tibetan-language newspaper was
launched in 1904 by a Moravian missionary in neighboring Ladakh,
and it gained credibility among its few Tibetan readers only
after its dire predictions of military aggression were fulfilled
with the arrival of a British expeditionary force later that
year. The first Tibetan newspaper to have any significant readership
was the Tibet Mirror, which came out of Kalimpong in 1925 and
was launched by legendary publisher-editor Gyen Tharchin, who
made a point of sending a copy to the 13th Dalai Lama.
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, inherited his predecessor's
subscription to the paper and the worldly problems it reflected,
but not until 1962, when he and thousands of his followers had
settled into exile in India, did the first official Tibetan
newspaper, Rangwan, or Freedom, see the light. The publisher
of the Tibet Mirror, which folded in 1964, noted the ironic
timing: "When there was freedom, there was no Freedom. When
there is no freedom, the Freedom has appeared." These days radio
is the number-one news source inside Tibet and the Internet
the source for news outside, say the participants in MediaChannel's Tibet Roundtable.
As
journalists of Tibet and activists for Tibetan rights, they
are well acquainted with both the risks and the rewards of the
nonviolent tradition of "speaking truth to power." Working in
a variety of media and languages, they have long struggled to
get views and information in and out of Tibet and into media
around the world, and sometimes they've made news themselves.
We have invited them to tell us how they do what they do, what
they're up against, and what they suggest others do to access
and improve current coverage of "The Roof of The World."..
|